Tuesday 18 June

The conference is held at Scandic Nidelven, Trondheim.

Host

Pernille Feilberg 

Pernille Feilberg has a background in Information Science. She works with external and internal communications at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at NTNU.

Her responsibilities include public relations, communications management, press contact, and assisting researchers in their public outreach through different communication channels. She is co-editor of the blog NTNU TechZone and contributes to NTNU's research magazine Gemini.

Introduction to the talks

Nicola Palmarini

Talk: AI for Healthy Aging

An introduction of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab initiative, a $250 million academic-industry partnership for the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence, the AI applications to the aging and longevity field, the related ethical implications with an example of AI applied to IoT data and sense-making for explanation.

Roger Moore

Talk: Talking to Machines: Are we nearly there yet?

Recent years have seen considerable progress in the deployment of ‘intelligent’ communicative agents such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa. Such speech-enabled assistants are distinguished from the previous generation of voice-based systems in that they claim to offer access to services and information via conversational interaction. In reality, interaction has limited depth, and evidence from users suggests that the capabilities of contemporary spoken language systems continue to fall short of what they expect and the market needs. We still seem to be some distance away from creating Autonomous Social Agents that are truly capable of conversing effectively with their human counterparts in real world situations. This talk will address these issues and will argue that we need to go far beyond our current capabilities and understanding if we are to move from developing machines that simply talk and listen to evolving ‘intelligent’ communicative devices that are capable of entering into productive cooperative interactive relationships with human beings.

Teemu Roos

Talk: From medieval legends to the Big Bad Wolf: Historical detective work based on AI

A defining characteristic of tales is that they are never told twice in the same way. The diffusion and evolution of tales shares many similarities with biological evolution. Advanced computing models and AI offer new opportunities for studying historical artefacts to understand their history better.

Kamalika Das

Talk: AI and Climate Change

Kamalika will discuss how machine learning has helped unify a diverse set of theories in Earth Science about the future of Amazon rainforests in this era of extreme climate events and increasing temperatures. In order to predict the effect of climate change on the health of these forests, it is essential to quantify how various climatic factors, such as rainfall and temperature, affect the vegetation in these regions. Machine learning helps discover the governing equation of climate-vegetation dynamics in the Amazon and explain the various divergent theories about the future of these forests.

Abhishek Thakur

Talk: Conversational AI and Deep Learning

What are the most necessary components needed to build chatbots? What kind of processing do you need? What kind of models work and what fails? Let's learn the secrets behind chatbots that no one talks about. In this talk, the speaker will talk about chatbots and their use in the industry with practical applications particularly in finance and insurance industries. The speaker will also talk about different ways a chatbot can be built and will demonstrate how to build a simple chatbot using Python and deep learning. The talk will detail the usefulness of chatbots in the industries with clear focus on how to implement them using Python and deep learning libraries such as Keras. The talk will also discuss the essential and most necessary components a chatbot should have.

Rudolf Mester

Talk: Cars that see, plan, and act: How AI boosts intelligent, safe, and efficient traffic

The discussion on the impact and challenges of using AI in autonomous systems, in particular in road or urban traffic, is intense, not only amongst scientists and engineers, but also in politics and in the general public. The talk aims at presenting the large variety of problems to be solved in order to let cars, ships, or drones fly fully automatically, and will sketch which tasks appear to be widely solved, in particular due to recent advances in machine learning, and which ones are still problematic and attract the attention of the scientific community.

Astrid Undheim

Talk: Bringing the power of AI to IoT

IoT sensor data will be the next big source of data for AI algorithms, with applications towards smart cities, smart buildings and much more. The talk will look into opportunities presented by the combination AI og IoT, as well as some research challenges ahead.